Location, location, location

May 14th, 2010 by Donovan Watts

As a User Experience Researcher, I often work with clients that are interested in incorporating the latest technology into their products. Research is valuable in the decision-making phase so that product managers and designers are aware of users perceptions and experiences. This awareness can help drive a product to success in the marketplace.

In the mobile space, location-based awareness is a hot topic and one that is becoming more prevalent. At AnswerLab, we’ve conducted numerous mobile studies. A key to conducting mobile studies as well as delivering actionable results lies in first-hand experience. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my own experiences with location aware apps on the iPhone.

There are a few apps on my iPhone that are aware of my location on Planet Earth and connect that information to whatever it is I’m doing with my phone. For instance, when I arrive somewhere such as a restaurant or a park, I check-in with foursquare. When I leave for a bike ride, I start up RunKeeper, and it tracks my ride in real time. And for those times that I find myself seeking good food, I start up Yelp and use the Monocle feature to augment reality; information overlaid on the camera app to present location data while looking around at the world.

I can use my iPhone just fine without Location Services turned on. However, when I enable this setting, apps, such as the ones I mentioned, become far more interesting.

Foursquare, for example, has done a fantastic job of building an entire app around the premise of one’s location. Let’s say I’m at work and decide to grab lunch at The Sentinel, a popular eatery in downtown San Francisco. While standing in the inevitable line, I pull out my iPhone, fire up foursquare, and ‘check-in.’ Upon checking in, my foursquare friends become aware of my presence. As well, if I check-in more than any other foursquare user at a particular venue, then I am deemed the Mayor of that location. While it may seem a bit silly to become the virtual Mayor of a place, it does provide incentive to check-in. Now that my foursquare friends know that I’ve checked in at The Sentinel, they might decide to drop by and eat lunch with me if they are in the neighborhood. Or, if I’ve stolen the title of Mayor from someone, they might be determined to procure the title back for themselves. And finally, House of Shields, a bar next door to The Sentinel, pays for ads on foursquare. So, when I check in at The Sentinel, an ad pops up that says I can get a free drink at House of Shields if I simply show them that I checked in on foursquare.

foursquare

RunKeeper, a wildly popular iPhone fitness app, uses location awareness to track my bike rides and walks. By tracking this information, I am able to visit the RunKeeper website, log in, and view a history of my activities. I can see a map of where I’ve gone, the time it took, and other valuable data. I can also share this data with others or keep it private. I won’t get into privacy issues concerning location data in this blog post but the two are heavily intertwined and thus a future post on the topic is imminent.

runkeeper

Yelp, the wildly popular online site for reviews, has taken the concept of location awareness a step further and included what it calls Monocle mode. Let’s say I am out and about in downtown San Francisco and I’m starting to get hungry. I load up Yelp on my iPhone, Choose Monocle, and point my iPhone’s camera at the surrounding area. If there is a venue in Yelps database that I am pointing the camera at, a small box will appear containing the name of the venue, the number of reviews it has received, the number of star ratings, and a link. If I click on the link, it takes me to the Yelp page where I can read more, call the venue, and more.

yelpaugumented.png

This is just a taste of what location aware apps are capable of doing. When designing your mobile app, consider opportunities to deliver a richer experience by incorporating this extra level of interaction. In other words, how can your app benefit the user by adding location awareness?

As I mentioned, with location awareness comes privacy issues. When incorporating location aware features into your app, keep in mind how this may affect users privacy as well as their overall experience. In this post, I focused on the features of location awareness rather than the privacy concerns it raises. Look for another post in the near future in which I’ll discuss some of the privacy concerns we’ve learned from users as we’ve conducted mobile studies at AnswerLab.

Tags:

Gaming Grows Up

April 27th, 2010 by Sal Becerra

Online gaming is no longer the purview of hard core, up-all-night enthusiasts.  The newest games that are successful at broadening market adoption have lowered barriers to entry, incorporated motivational drivers for the larger audience (e.g. social elements), and improved their viral expansion loop.  Ensuring strong growth within the increasing revenue opportunities of these markets leads gaming companies to benchmark and evaluate their products.  AnswerLab is increasingly assisting clients to develop success metrics in gaming products, incorporating playability with a strong understanding of the roles that user experience research and usability have within the space.

Game success could be defined simply by player counts and revenue.  However, games with long-term success in mind are creating new development challenges, adding additional metrics of success to ensure continuous engagement and strategic expansion.  These success metrics are becoming increasingly important as competitors enter the space.   Success within these metrics shows how game design differs in some very important ways from application design.  For example:

  • Challenges are key drivers of game engagement, yet detrimental within applications
  • Sequential discovery of features and capabilities heightens engagement in gaming, which is not the typical effect in commercial applications
  • Motivation for engagement is driven more from elicited emotions than perceived utility

Some success metrics apply across game and application design:

  • Objectives & rules to complete the objectives must be easily understood
  • Key elements to complete the objectives must be discoverable, usable, and comprehendible
  • Contextual help and concise messaging is key
  • Showcasing progress & highlighting success furthers engagement

These are critical factors for driving adoption and engagement of a game.  For game designers who can make use of these factors, and tailor them to the motivations of their target players, they will ensure successful experiences with their games.  But what motivates users to become players?  Through studies focused around gaming, AnswerLab researchers have grouped player motivations into BAGS.

Badgers: Collectors of feedback largely reflecting behavior outside of the game’s primary objective

Achievers: Those who showcase skill/expertise level at the game’s primary objective

Game Itself: Players who are primarily interested in the story, challenges and/or dynamics of the game

Social: Those who are drawn by the opportunity to interact and communicate with other players

Each of these motivational factors varies in intensity among different players, and there is a world of factors within the game itself that impacts engagement.  Understanding the most motivational factors of target players, while analyzing key metrics throughout game development, is a powerful approach to assessing and improving the player experience. Game designers and developers that keep in mind these essential building blocks will be well on their way to ensuring business success of fun & games.

Tags: , , , , ,

International Approval! You’re Kidding, … Right?

March 31st, 2010 by Liang Zhang

Recently, AnswerLab conducted a research program to determine the correct direction for a global media’s site design. Across the US and Asia, the same concept was selected by both sets of users. The users’ underlying reasoning and thought process was unexpectedly enlightening. Digging deep into a user’s preferences is a major part of user testing, and a comparison of US to Asian markets is expected to uncover vastly different requirements for each. When preferences start to merge, it certainly gives designers as well as researchers pause. While the simple solution is to accept some convergence, deeper questioning and on-the-fly method changes uncovered interesting, yet understandable reasons behind the similarities in preference:

Taipei

1) We “Grew Up” on the Web together: While fledgling websites were finding their way in the early days of the web, Asian consumers were finding their way to the only sites available, which were decidedly American. Site creativity outpaced the technology available to have multiple, customized sites for a long time, and overseas users became conditioned to the singular designs. As the technology, and sites themselves matured, users hungry for content delighted in language accommodation. Study evidence uncovered similar tastes in layout based on this conditioned expectation of how sites should look and behave.

2) Personification is key to unlocking feelings: It is acknowledged that some cultures make a habit of not verbalizing feelings. While this may be perfectly acceptable in a social setting, it does make research difficult. To ask international testers for their feelings about a website can often garner you a lot of blank stares. However, asking these same testers to describe the site as if it were a person, whether it would be hip or stodgy, sharp or dull witted, friendly or grim, will bring out the rich set of observations into how users perceive the site. This is the useful data that can be coupled with stateside testers’ feelings to create useful design recommendations.

3) Behavior drives preferences: Although demographics play an important part in how users perceive features and options, it is very often behavior that can lead to surprising final choices. In fact, nationality/culture is perhaps one of the most important demographics and yet in this study we did not find significant differences across regions. When study goals focus on the impact of change to existing users, these types of findings are likely to crop up. For example, if you were testing a music application, and Bruce Springsteen was a test subject, would it be more important that he was a rock star, or that he was 50+ years old? ;-)

Taipei

While wildly different explanations can yield the exact same result, it is key to understand these differences to ensure the layers of design do not conflict with these expectations. While both sets of testers in our study expect to see weather modules high on the right side of the page, it is important to understand that US testers have often self selected weather to be in that location, while the Taiwanese test group understands weather as “news” and expects news to be in the upper right portion of the page. Modularizing weather may not be suitable for a site in Taiwan, as they expect news to change, whereas US testers show that news is expected to be separated from weather.

There are interesting and important cultural nuances and underpinnings to study findings, but showing user preference for the same concept shouldn’t be an overwhelming surprise. Digging deeper into the thought process will uncover long held preconceptions, feelings and similar behaviors. These are some key reasons to conduct user experience testing when taking your website overseas.

Tags: , , ,

Will Xfinity be Comcastic?

February 18th, 2010 by Sally Cohen

Comcast recently announced that it is re- branding its products under the Xfinity name.  Re-branding their home cable, broadband, and phone services under a new name may be an attempt to convey a change in the products themselves or a shift in brand values. However, to truly impact the bottom line, changing the label isn’t enough – Comcast must focus on changing the entire user experience.

Companies primarily undertake re-branding efforts to  affect users’ brand perception. However, the most successful efforts are those where the entire experience – not just the wrapping – is enhanced or improved to the benefit of the end customer.  Often, how a customer interacts with a product or service and the company that supplies it – including the actions taken by the company if anything goes wrong —are more influential on loyalty and repurchase metrics than the product itself.  In an era of commoditized products and services where the barriers to switching are low, companies whose re-branding efforts only polish the surface – but don’t improve the user experience – run the risk of losing.

Comcast Xfinity LogoOther companies have been successful in changing both their name and their user experience. Take, for example, the case of Voicestream Wireless, the oft-forgotten brand name of a wireless carrier that was just the 8th largest in the US in 2001. Today, after an acquisition and a re-branding overhaul, the same company is the 4th largest carrier in the US, has celebrity spokespeople (Catherine Zeta Jones!), a slick logo, ultra-cool handsets, and – more importantly – is tied for the best-rated customer care amongst wireless carriers by JD Power. Yes, I am talking about T-Mobile.

But back to Comcast. On the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Comcast currently has a substantially lower rating than competing cable and satellite TV providers like DirecTV and Cox Communications. A wholesale improvement of the entire user experience – from shopping to sign-up to everday usage to customer service – will make Xfinity successful.  Without the support of real experiential improvements, the new Xfinity name will simply be another cable brand offering below-par customer experiences. Our most successful user experience projects include implementing and measuring not just improvements to surface design features and look and feel, but to functionality, content and customer interactions.  When viewed holistically, companies can tie these improvements back to specific business outcomes, and measure success along the path.  In some ways, Comcast is lucky in that they do not have to make grand assumptions about which material changes are priorities for their customers.  The details are readily available on which improvements will help make a success of the Xfinity products.  Not only do they have their own customer service data, but there is a wealth of information in specialized user sites, social media and the blogosphere for them to tap into.  Active online forums like those on DSLreports.com actually contain useful information on which to base user centric improvements.  When embarking on a user experience improvement plan, monitoring social media can provide some great concepts to test, and some great ad-hoc measurements along the way. Formal user experience research can help quantitatively benchmark these improvements over time.

A great product and great user experience make a great brand – not vice versa.  Staying customer-focused will help companies like Comcast concentrate on the entire experience to maintain the brand promise.  Remember when Starbucks changed the coffee machines to have a lower profile allowing better engagement with the barrista?  Did this have anything to do with how the coffee tasted? No, but it had everything to do with the intimate experience of going to the coffee shop.

Let’s hope Xfinity is better than Comcastic.

Tags: ,

The Apple iPad – a revolutionary game-changer

January 28th, 2010 by Donovan Watts

Apple considers the iPad to be “magical and revolutionary” and it may very well be. From a usability perspective, tablets have found only a few niches. Tablet adoption has floundered for years with a primary problem being an existing operating system crammed into the device. Apple again demonstrates its design capabilities not just with the sleek form factor, but with the specialized OS running the device. This is likely to be the game-changer for this tablet. The floating keyboard, and gesture support familiar to all pinch and zoom enthusiasts will adapt to professional as well as entertainment applications. iTunes and the AppStore have revolutionized how enthusiasts obtain enhanced functionality and entertainment, and the iPad gains an immediate user base by running applications in the AppStore. Significant reinvestment is not required.

The dedication to design sets Apple apart, and the tools from the iPod to the iPhone have fundamentally changed the way regular users interact with technology. The iPad is essentially a larger, and more capable iPhone. With more real-estate, and a well known OS this could be the tool for personal computing. In a world where everything gets smaller and faster, the iPad’s large format may provide the perfect platform for user capabilities. We are looking forward to our first iPad studies.

Tags: ,

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »